Author Archives: Tyler Hansen

Twelve years ago, Ingrid Scheel burned out in an engineering program and worked part time filing papers at a small fiber optic technology firm. You wouldn’t have predicted her future success. But now Ingrid holds two college degrees. Those papers she used to file? Now she signs them as the company’s vice president. And to keep the firm on the leading edge of producing hair-thin micro sensors, she’s pursuing an engineering management master’s degree 100% online with Oregon State University Ecampus.

There should have been no doubt that Nikki Brown’s career would revolve around business. Her childhood was marked by one clever business venture after another. From lemonade stands to selling lottery tickets (seriously), she was a one-kid start-up machine. Now she is an expert on marketing and consumer behavior who teaches courses online for Oregon State Ecampus on those very topics.

Driven by the expertise of its faculty and an award-winning faculty development program, Oregon State University has been named one of the nation’s 10 best providers of online education for the fourth straight year by U.S. News & World Report. In a report released today, Oregon State Ecampus is ranked No. 6 out of more than 350 higher education institutions in the category of Best Online Bachelor’s Programs.

One of the most important items in any parent’s toolkit is the ability to adapt to unexpected change. It’s how we get another meal on the table within minutes of our children spilling their mac and cheese on the floor. Kristen Dhuse discovered the importance of parental improvisation as soon as she and her husband, Ryan, learned they were expecting a child in 2014. Kristen was a successful engineer in the greater Seattle area and had devised a plan to put her professional life on hold while she returned to school in hopes of becoming a software developer.

How old were you when you discovered your dream job? Many of us are still trying to figure it out. Not Jason Deger. He knew at a young age – thanks to camping trips with his dad in national parks – that he would someday be a park ranger. It wasn’t a matter of debate. It was a matter of time. And it took years. But he never wavered in his pursuit.

When Albert Diaz gets home and his kids are asleep, he’ll study alongside the only Oregon State student he has met face-to-face: his wife, Samantha, a psychology major. She was the first in the family to enroll with OSU Ecampus. They have never set foot on the Oregon State campus. They both decided to apply to OSU — and become a full-fledged Beaver Nation family — thanks to a Google search. The Diaz family is a fitting example of the benefits of the university’s wildly successful distance education efforts.

It took one high school psychology class to kick-start Mary Ellen Dello Stritto’s lifelong interest in how humans behave. Her educational history and subsequent career in higher education are inextricably linked to studying and educating others on that behavior. And now as the assistant director for Oregon State Ecampus Research Unit, Mary Ellen combines that extensive knowledge with ample experience as a researcher to contribute to the field of online teaching and learning.

Oregon State University Ecampus is one of America’s best providers of online education, and in this video three recent graduates discuss why Ecampus’ national rankings helped assure them that Oregon State was the best place to earn a degree online and give them a path to a successful career.

Randy Ocampo knows only one way to live life: full tilt, full time. He spends his days working as an academic advisor to students in the Oregon State Ecampus online postbaccalaureate computer science program. How does he fill the rest of his hours? He has an always-on-the-go family at home, he’s pursuing his MBA on campus with Oregon State, and when he’s not consumed by those two aspects of his life, he’s an avid photographer, paints custom cars, does mixed martial arts and the list goes on.

It was a fundamental question in search of a much-needed answer: How can distance students in introductory biology courses online learn to operate a microscope without being in a physical laboratory? The simple answer was that they couldn’t. So Oregon State fixed that problem by developing a first-of-its-kind, 3-D virtual microscope that increases student access to learning and eliminates a barrier to degree completion.